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Conflict detector picks the best bits in political debates

By Paul Marks

Tonight, millions of Americans will watch the first of three 90-minute election debates as presidential candidates Barack Obama and Mitt Romney square off – while millions who can’t tune in will probably catch a recording later. But if the debate is a lacklustre snore draw, with just a handful of worthwhile flashpoints, there’s no reason those watching the re-run should have to plough through the entire thing.

At least, that’s the thinking behind a novel AI system designed to detect the liveliest bouts of verbal fisticuffs in a debate. Developed at the University of Glasgow in the UK and the Idiap Research Institute in Martigny, Switzerland, the system has essentially been taught to recognise the sound of people arguing heatedly. The team behind it hope it will one day allow viewers and listeners to fast forward to the best bits of recorded debates.

“The idea is that if you like the ‘hot’ conflict moments in a TV debate, you can pick the segments where the discussion is more heated,” says project head Alessandro Vinciarelli at Glasgow. “Otherwise, you can pick segments where the discussion is calm.”

Building the system involved working out what kind of discussions people regarded as a heated argument – or “verbal conflict” as the researchers called it – and then extracting its telltale signs so that a computer could be taught to recognise it.

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Hallmarks of discord

To do this, they paid 600 users of Amazon’s web-based crowdsourcing engine, the Mechanical Turk, to watch 1400 30-second video clips from 45 political debates and assign each a score corresponding to the conflict level they perceived. The team found, unsurprisingly, that the hallmarks of verbal conflict were all in the audio channel&colon; the frequency of behaviour like raising one’s voice, interrupting the other person and talking faster were the defining features of discord in a debate. No fine-grained analysis of grimacing faces or dismissive gestures was needed to pick these moments out.

The finding meant not only that no expensive image processing was required to build the system, but also that intense argument could be detected simply by processing audio. In other words, radio debates could undergo the same treatment as TV debates, says Vinciarelli.

In tests, the team found that the prototype conflict-sensing software agrees with humans over what constitutes intense argument 80 per cent of the time – not bad for a first attempt.

In addition to helping viewers find the action in a debate, the system could also allow broadcasters to automatically compile debate highlights for newscasts. It might also help assess how broadcast ratings vary in the course of a long debate, to see if a fall-off in viewers correlates with heated argument – or the lack or it.

The system will be unveiled at the ACM Multimedia Conference, which kicks off in Nara, Japan, at the end of October.

A senior BBC news producer is sceptical that the technology will have much impact, however. “Most political debate on television is watched live, with only a very small number of people watching later on catch-up services,” says Robbie Gibb, editor of the BBC’s Daily Politics and Sunday Politics TV programmes. “Despite research telling us that viewers have very differing opinions about how they prefer political debates to be conducted, this technology is unlikely to change the way they watch.”